The Goldilocks SDLC

Throughout my consulting and engagement management career, the vast majority of projects which I have been a part of--either as a leader or as a follower--have been along the lines of Iterative-to-Agile development methodologies. Even though the training i got early on at the gigantic EDS told us to look to
waterfall first, finding waterfall even within EDS was something of a rarity. At least for me.

The dynamics of business changes, politics, and shifting priorities often make original requirements obsolete. Thus, some experts feel comfortable saying that Waterfall has been discredited. I disagree with this statement, because 1) people still use it, and 2) they use it for good reason. But I'm not here to defend waterfall.

With one of my recent clients, we started off having deliverables which took about 4-5 months to turn around. [Just to clarify, when I say "deliverable" in this context, I mean a full SDLC cycle, so starting with a bundle of requirements, through testing and rollout.] These types of Iterative cycles have been pretty typical in my experience, so I felt right at home from the get-go. I think in most cases they provide optimal flexibility and speed-to-market. Though it should not have surprised us, this client turned out to be a very challenging one to manage due to all of the dynamics i described above, not the least of which was internal politicking. As a result, we had been shifting to an ever-shrinking deliverables window, which at one point oscillated between one week to one month. So now we're talking
Agile territory, baby!

This also has plenty of downsides:

It requires too much micromanagement. Often, you have to know what each of your developers or analysts are doing at any given time, because they can be stuck with a problem and don't tell anyone for 8 hours. Even delegation to trustworthy individuals comes down to that great adage uttered by the Gipper, "trust, but verify."

Too many streams of work. While managing a program of 1-3 projects, each of which is 4-5 months long is manageable in my experience, managing a dozen "projects" which constantly begin and end is much more challenging, and delegating both work and decision-making becomes more difficult.

The tiniest scope, communication, or workload leak reverberates like a tsunami due to the compressed timelines and interdependencies with the other "projects."

Too much paperwork! Time tracking, expense tracking, BILLING, and A/R ACCRUALS! I didn't sign up to be an accountant, did I?

Getting mired in the details and loosing track of the big picture. Yeah, we all want to make sure we build a solid roadmap and buttress it with a scaleable architecture. But with all of these details, sometimes you can't see the forest from the trees, as they say.

Just thinking about Extreme Programming makes me tired, so good thing I've moved on! Waterfall may be boring, but at least it's predictable. Hence my goldilocks tagline. I guess too much of anything is a bad thing. Well, almost anything. But that's a discussion for my other blog.What does Sun Tzu say about project management methodologies? Read
my post from earlier this year. If you like that Sun Tzu post, check out the additional two musings
here, and
here.